Decision Making

Knight's distinction is clean and consequential: risk is measurable probability; uncertainty is not. Insurance handles risk; entrepreneurship handles uncertainty. Profit exists precisely because some situations cannot be…

Akutagawa's 1922 short story presents a single violent event through seven contradictory testimonies, none of which can be reconciled into a master account — a formal argument that objective truth in human affairs may be…

Hamilton's 1929 play constructs an entire dramatic tension from a single room, a single evening, and two men who believe their intellectual superiority exempts them from moral accountability — a disposition disturbingly…

Cobb's 1935 novel reconstructs the 1915 Souain court-martial, in which French soldiers were executed not for cowardice but to satisfy a general's need to deflect blame for a failed assault. The book is a clinical anatomy…

Simon's 1947 book is one of the foundational texts of modern management theory — the argument that real organisations make decisions through bounded rationality rather than the idealised comprehensive rationality of clas…

Peter George's 1958 thriller, written under the pseudonym Peter Bryant, dramatised what systems theorists were only beginning to articulate: that sufficiently complex sociotechnical systems can fail catastrophically thro…

Marker's 1962 photo-roman—a story told almost entirely through still images—is a meditation on memory, causality, and the impossibility of escaping the structures that formed you. Its central conceit, that a man is sent…

Burdick and Wheeler wrote this novel at the precise moment when automated military command systems were outpacing the human judgment meant to govern them—a structural problem that has never left us. The central catastrop…

The companion paper to Simon's books already in the library. Here Simon argues that complex systems evolve faster when they are hierarchically modular — "nearly decomposable" — because subsystems can evolve independently…

Le Carré's masterwork of institutional betrayal depicts the Circus—Britain's intelligence service—as an organisation so encrusted with hierarchy, loyalty myth, and defensive ritual that it cannot identify the mole corrod…

Goodwin's memoir of his years as a Kennedy-Johnson speechwriter and policy architect is the backstory behind 'Quiz Show,' the film drawn partly from his investigation of the 1950s television fraud scandals. For product d…

Damasio's central discovery is that patients with damage to the emotional centres of the brain do not become more rational — they become unable to decide at all. Emotion is not noise in the decision-making process; it is…

Ted Chiang's novella — miscategorised here as essay, it is short fiction — is the source for Villeneuve's 'Arrival' and remains one of the most rigorous explorations of how language restructures cognition and temporal pe…

Meadows' most concentrated piece of writing: a hierarchy of twelve places where you can intervene in a complex system, ranked from weakest to strongest. The insight that most intuitive interventions cluster at the weak e…

The basic grammar of systems: stocks, flows, feedback loops, leverage points. Meadows teaches you to stop asking "who caused this" and start asking "what structure produces this behaviour" — the single most useful shift…

Kahneman's life's work compressed into one book: the distinction between System 1 (fast, automatic, intuitive) and System 2 (slow, deliberate, effortful), and the systematic biases that arise when System 1 handles questi…

Lewis's book is a popular treatment of the psychology of impulsive behaviour — why we make purchases we did not plan, choose options we will regret, click on things we did not mean to click on. The research it summarises…

A behavioral economist and a cognitive psychologist demonstrate that scarcity — of any resource — produces a measurable, involuntary cognitive state: heightened focus on the scarce resource at the cost of everything else…

Duke, a former professional poker player turned decision-science teacher, argues that the quality of a decision and the quality of its outcome are different things, and that treating them as the same is the single most e…

Miozzi addresses a gap in price theory that matters for product strategy: if markets are always in motion, what do current prices actually tell us? The Austrian school insight is that disequilibrium prices carry differen…

Munger's collected speeches, essays, and conversations on mental models, multidisciplinary thinking, and the psychology of human misjudgment, edited by Peter Kaufman. The Stripe Press expanded edition is the definitive v…

Aral and Li treat the generative search interface not as a neutral conduit but as an architecture that actively shapes the epistemic dispositions of its users — a framing that connects squarely to the library's concern w…

Aral and Ju run a genuinely ambitious experiment — 2,234 participants, 11,024 real advertising outputs, a live field test on X generating ~5M impressions — and use it to identify three distinct mechanisms by which AI age…

The paper's most productive contribution is not technical but conceptual: it demonstrates that LLMs default to rigid policy adherence even when context demands discretionary judgment, which maps directly onto the classic…

McCann's central move is elegant and underexploited: Rice's theorem (1953) already proves that no behavioral layer added on top of a Turing-complete system can ever fully govern its effects — the gap between what a syste…

Sergeeva, Leonardi, and Faraj identify a clean analytical failure in how organisations talk about AI: adoption, automation, and augmentation frameworks all presuppose that new technology is absorbed into existing authori…

Peterson frames a problem that most AI governance literature ignores: compliance layers built to make algorithmic decisions reviewable can also be gamed by successive administrations who learn to satisfy the form of over…

Falk and Tsoukalas construct a task-based competitive model to show that the real problem with AI-driven displacement is not ignorance but a classic collective action failure: each firm rationally automates while the agg…

The authors reframe what looks like a labor market reform as something fundamentally different: a platform-mediated private market for intangible assets. This distinction matters because it explains why standard wage-set…

Gigerenzer has spent four decades dismantling the assumption that rational decision-making means maximising expected utility, and this paper reads as a late summation of that project — a direct engagement with Simon's le…

Bonomi takes a well-established result from production economics — that specialization raises output — and traces its civic cost: when cross-domain knowledge concentrates in a small integrator class, electoral competitio…

Ju takes a question that organization theorists have circled for decades — when does coordination actually change the outcome rather than merely consuming resources? — and gives it a formal answer borrowed from distribut…

The paper's central finding is unsettling in a precise way: giving users the ability to edit AI reasoning increases their sense of control but also increases over-reliance when the AI is wrong — an illusion of control th…

Aral (MIT, one of the most cited scholars in digital economics) and Caosun construct a formal dynamic model that makes precise what practitioners sense but cannot yet argue: AI adoption can be individually rational at ev…

This paper addresses a fundamental challenge for product directors building AI-powered products: how do users develop trust and delegation strategies when the same AI system performs differently across different tasks? T…

Aral, Li, and Zuo do something rarely achieved in AI-impact research: they run a genuine global field experiment — 24,000 queries across 243 countries — rather than theorising from platform disclosures. The empirical arc…

Palminteri and Wyart have established themselves as a productive collaboration in the library's decision-making research, with their previous work scoring 8 for bringing computational insights to human judgment under unc…

Palminteri and Wyart's analysis of pathological decision-making reveals the computational foundations beneath everyday judgment by examining what happens when these systems fail. Their focus on Bayesian inference breakdo…

Palminteri and Wyart tackle the fundamental question of how technology changes who makes decisions and how. Their framework distinguishing behavioural analysis, nudging, and boosting offers product leaders a vocabulary f…

Palminteri and Wyart, whose empirical work on decision-making under uncertainty already enriches this library, here tackle the foundational question of what decision science actually is as a discipline. For product direc…

The intersection of statistical decision theory with perception and cognition offers product directors a rigorous framework for understanding how people actually process information and make choices — not the rational ac…